24-BIT SUPPORT NEEDED!!!

SanDisk, please put a 24-bit DSP in your music players so that people can listen to their higher-than-CD quality FLAC files.  There is a market out there for it, and you will make a lot of money from audiophiles if your devices could support 24-bit FLAC files, even if limited to 48 or 44.1khz.

Please do us a favor and help us not have to spend hundreds of dollars on Hifiman or Astell & Kern players, and build 24-bit support into the Clips.

Thank you.

@hogger129 wrote:

SanDisk, please put a 24-bit DSP in your music players so that people can listen to their higher-than-CD quality FLAC files.  There is a market out there for it, and you will make a lot of money from audiophiles if your devices could support 24-bit FLAC files, even if limited to 48 or 44.1khz.

 

Please do us a favor and help us not have to spend hundreds of dollars on Hifiman or Astell & Kern players, and build 24-bit support into the Clips.

 

Thank you.

Anything “higher than CD quality” is probably a rip-off, unless you have the ears of a 

Also, those files take up ridiculous amounts of space that are just not practical for a portable device. Those files will play on a Rockboxed Clip, though.

@marvin_martian wrote:

 

Anything “higher than CD quality” is probably a rip-off, unless you have the ears of a 

Also, those files take up ridiculous amounts of space that are just not practical for a portable device. Those files will play on a Rockboxed Clip, though.

As I understand it though (and I could be wrong, but) Rockbox, while it will play 24-bit files actually down-converts them to 16-bit on the fly so there still is no advantage to use these “higher quality” files in the 1st place. You won’t be hearing anything more.

@tapeworm wrote:


@marvin_martian wrote:

 

Anything “higher than CD quality” is probably a rip-off, unless you have the ears of a 

Also, those files take up ridiculous amounts of space that are just not practical for a portable device. Those files will play on a Rockboxed Clip, though.


As I understand it though (and I could be wrong, but) Rockbox, while it will play 24-bit files actually down-converts them to 16-bit on the fly so there still is no advantage to use these “higher quality” files in the 1st place. You won’t be hearing anything more.

You are absolutely correct in your understanding.

Of course, I personally don’t think there is anything more to be heard anyways…:neutral_face:

Yeah the DAC on the Clip players only has about 15 bits worth of actual dynamic range, so while rockbox does everything at 32 bit precision, the final output will be limited to about 90-95dB SNR. As for why you’d care, probably because you don’t know any better. Expecting >>95dB to matter on a small portable player is dumb. You use them with headphones in the real world, not in an anechoic chamber. You’ll never take the Clip anywhere quiet enough to use the dynamic range it has.

There is a noticeable difference in the files that I have in 44.1khz, 16-bit (which are CD rips) and higher-resolution files encoded in 96 and 88.2 khz, and 24-bit.

There is more detail, less noise, the music is not dynamic range compressed like many CD’s today are.

On a good pair of headphones, one CAN notice the subtleties in the music.  It does not take golden ears to hear the difference, only a good pair of headphones.

iPod Touch, Classic and the iPhone all support up to 48 khz, 24-bit as long as it’s Apple Lossless encoded, and even there, I can hear a difference between my ALAC CD rips and Apple Lossless-encoded 24-bit music with my Sennheiser HD558 headphones.  The headphone jack downsamples to 44.1/16, but through the dock connector, 48/24 is possible.

The obvious answer would be “then go buy an iPod,” but I think that is a bad way to do business, and if iPod can play up to 48/24 lossless files, I don’t see why competing products should be any different.  Plus I don’t really want a product that is tied up to Apple’s eco system (requires iTunes to manage).

@hogger129 wrote:

There is a noticeable difference in the files that I have in 44.1khz, 16-bit (which are CD rips) and higher-resolution files encoded in 96 and 88.2 khz, and 24-bit.

 

There is more detail, less noise, the music is not dynamic range compressed like many CD’s today are.

 

 

 

Sure, but thats because they’re mastered better.  Convert a good master to 44.1k/16 when you rip and you’re golden.  None of the compatibility issue and none of the mass market dynamic range compressed CD ■■■■.

@hogger129 wrote:

iPod Touch, Classic and the iPhone all support up to 48 khz, 24-bit as long as it’s Apple Lossless encoded, and even there, I can hear a difference between my ALAC CD rips and Apple Lossless-encoded 24-bit music with my Sennheiser HD558 headphones.  The headphone jack downsamples to 44.1/16, but through the dock connector, 48/24 is possible.

 

 

 

Thats the thing, the analog out can’t even do a full 16 effective bits, same as teh clip.  So you’d save a lot of space by converting in advance.  Probably have better quality too since the resampling is often not great on power constrained devices.

If you just don’t feel like converting files, install rockbox.  I added support for FLAC files up to 192k/24 to the rockbox FLAC decoder years ago.  Plus its way more power efficient than the crappy sandisk one.


 

Thats the thing, the analog out can’t even do a full 16 effective bits, same as teh clip.  So you’d save a lot of space by converting in advance.  Probably have better quality too since the resampling is often not great on power constrained devices.

 

If you just don’t feel like converting files, install rockbox.  I added support for FLAC files up to 192k/24 to the rockbox FLAC decoder years ago.  Plus its way more power efficient than the crappy sandisk one.

Thanks for your input.  Perhaps all this 24-bit, high frequency stuff is pointless.  It seems like a person needs all kinds of expensive receivers and digital-to-analog converters to hear the difference anyway.  I think you are correct that the reason I am hearing the difference is because the mastering is better.  Those headphones I have are pretty revealing also.

I do use Rockbox because I think it makes the device sound better, but I thought it will still downsample to 16/44.1 anyway since those are the limits of the player I am using (Clip Zip).

I think I have about had it trying to play back 24-bit audio, not worth all the headaches and I’ll just stick to CD rips or make downsampled versions of my high-rez stuff for now. 

I can’t wait until they come out with Rockbox for the iPod Touch.

Yes, we downsample everything to 44.1k. In theory we could clock the DAC higher, but its pointless and makes things like gapless playback very difficult if you change the clock. On the upside, as of this week, a new resampler based on my hermite interpolation code (but massively improved by others) was added so at least quality isn’t too bad if you must downsample. I don’t think we’ll ever run things on the Touch.

@hogger129 wrote:



I can’t wait until they come out with Rockbox for the iPod Touch.

I doubt you’ll ever see that, but there is a Rockbox app for Android devices. It’s still a work in progress, and must be side loaded, but it’s probably farther along than any Touch port will ever be.